


Canary

by Linnai



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Action, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Pastfic, Pre-Relationship, exploration of prophetic abilities, young zul is an anxious nerd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 09:53:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16700236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linnai/pseuds/Linnai
Summary: Apprentice prophet Zul finds himself working for the king under inauspicious circumstances.





	Canary

Even as she removed her blade from the corpse of the false king’s soldier, a spear hit her from behind, sliding between the scales of her cape and piercing her leather armor to lodge just under her right shoulderblade.

 

She howled in pain and fury, her voice joining the violent cacophony enveloping the camp as she whirled around.

 

Two rebels. Her sweat-blurred vision resolved them into a fetish-adorned hexxer, wisps of pale purple energy swirling about their gesturing fingers, and a warrior raising his shortblade as he charged.

 

The hexxer released the curse and it shot towards her, a seething grey bolt that clipped her as she threw herself to the side. She stumbled to her knees, the curse of weakness dragging her down to the boot-churned sand and dirt.

 

Adrenaline pounded through her veins as she fought the curse.  _ We can’t lose this outpost.  _ She could feel the thuds of the warrior’s stride as he continued his charge, even as her hearing went muffled and eyesight blurred. With monumental effort, she raised her sword and swung.

 

He ducked and slammed his shortblade into her belly. She tried to scream but the only thing that came out was a choked gasp. Wasting no time, the enemy soldier wrapped both hands around the hilt and  _ wrenched _ upwards. 

 

**PAIN**

 

The sword fell from her numb fingers. She followed it to the ground.

 

_ I… I don’t want to die. _

 

There was sand against her cheek.

 

_ I don’t want to die. _

 

A boot kicked her over onto her back. The blood-drenched shortsword was now against her neck.

 

_ Idontwanttodie _

 

\------------------------------

 

Zul woke up with a gasp.

 

The young prophet clutched at his stomach, heart pounding, feeling the phantom agony receding as his trembling hands pawed at unbroken skin.

 

_ I’m alive. I’m  _ not _ dying. _

 

Breathe in.

 

Breathe out.

 

_ I’m alive. _

 

Breathe in.

 

Breathe out.

 

Eventually the adrenaline faded enough for him to uncurl from his fetal position.

 

_ Focus. _

 

He sat up, peeling off the sweat-soaked sheets and swiping at the wetness on his face. At the foot of the cot lay the cold remains of his bone and incense offering, dimly illuminated by a sliver of moonlight slipping through the tent flap.

 

Well, he’d gotten the vivid vision he’d entreated the spirits for, that was for sure.

 

Somehow it was always worse than he remembered.

 

He felt about in the darkness to his left and hoisted his little customized box of writing materials up onto his lap. Out came the little mana lamp, which he hooked onto a tusk. Then the writing board, then the parchment, then the marvelous little fountain pen that required no inkwell.

 

It was critically important to record visions while they were still fresh, before the vagaries of imperfect memory sullied it. The box went wherever he went.

 

The quality of light in the vision likely indicated an early afternoon. The sand and dirt and scrub - the border of Zuldazar and Vol’dun. The green tufting on the slain guard’s wristband - the western regiment, which was due to set up camp at the border last night. His vision would most likely come to pass either today or tomorrow, unless measures were taken.

 

He tried to write this down. 

 

The words were unreadable, his hands shaking too hard. He could still feel the blade slitting his stomach.

 

Zul cursed. This was time-sensitive info, and he needed to record and then share it as soon as possible, the camp was of major strategic-

 

“Zul?”

 

The troll’s head whipped around to behold a face looming in the darkness a mere breath to his right. The parchment and pen went flying as he scrambled away, his back immediately hitting the durable canvas wall of the tent, even as his reflexive check to his danger-sense came back with nothing.

 

A warm hand reached out to clasp his shoulder. He flinched at the touch.

 

“Zul? What is the matter?”

 

Something about the cadence of the voice - oh.

 

The king.

 

The new king, whose father’s abrupt death had kicked off this entire messy power struggle.

 

The king, who’d been the target of so many nighttime assassins that as of yesterday the council had ordered Zul, with his supernatural talent for self-preservation, to accompany him at all times and sleep in the same tent.

 

Zul flushed and sketched out as much of a bow as he could when sitting in bed.

 

“Ah - My apologies, King Rastakhan. I had forgotten your presence. I be accustomed to sleeping alone.” He was proud of his steady voice.

 

Rastakhan waved it away. “You were making noises in ya sleep. Like you were trying to shout.”

 

The king was wearing only simple sleeping leathers in the humid heat of the Zuldazar night. Zul looked away; it felt wrong to see the king without the ceremonial accouterments denoting his great rank, one high above that of an apprentice prophet. As he did so he spotted the forms of Reh’tani and Tevuha, two of the king’s bodyguards, in the dim light of the lamp, weapons raised and wary.

 

“There is nothing of concern, my king! I merely had a vision,” Zul hastily asserted, fingers worrying at the blankets. Even as he was saying it, Zul touched upon his powers in a more deliberate manner, focusing on the quiet susurration of the spirits and testing the strands of the most likely futures for danger. None found.

 

“Mmm... I see.”

 

“I apologize for rousing you.”

 

The king nodded and turned away. The bodyguards relaxed and lowered their weapons, accompanying the king back to their section of the tent. Zul felt a weight lift upon seeing them do so, but only just.

 

If Zul failed in his duty and allowed harm to fall upon the king, those same guards would be his executioners. And they  _ would  _ follow through, with no hesitation. By making his life dependent on the King’s welfare, any incoming harm to him would cause Zul’s personal danger awareness to flare up. It was a clever use of a prophet’s innate ability, Zul had to admit.

 

He and the other acolytes had been taught of this tactic as a curiosity, something used only in dire times. Trolls with the power of Sight were not found in great abundance, and ones sensitive enough to the spirits to function as viable “bodyguards” even rarer. Prophets were not omniscient, and one could easily end up needlessly killing such a valuable resource.

 

Zul was the most promising apprentice in decades.

 

These were dire times, indeed.

 

Surfacing from his anxious brooding, Zul remembered the reason he’d originally awoken. He busied himself with searching for his lost pen and parchment, irritated at himself for his childish bout of fright. Mana lamp in hand, he peered around the dim tent.

 

The parchment and board had slid under his cot, but the pen was nowhere to be found, and Zul thought sourly of the chain of events that had led to this as he continued his undignified search.

 

“Looking for this?”

 

Zul banged his head on the underside of a table as he looked up to see the king proffering the missing pen.

 

“Ahh yes, my thanks,” he muttered, internally groaning and wishing to disappear. Wishing that he was back at the temple, comfortably alone and safe and unbothered with his scrolls in the depths of the cavernous library.

 

“So… all your visions be like that? Thrashing about in ya sleep?”

 

Oh no.  _ Conversation. _

 

“Eeh… oftentimes,” Zul confessed.

 

“Hah, I was wondering about ya comment on sleeping alone! I thought they packed in the apprentices like sardines over at the temple!”

 

“They do. I tend to have more vivid…  _ dreams _ than most, though. Too disturbing to the others. Again, I apologize for waking you.” Zul started, feeling defensive. How was he expected to both provide useful visions and also do...  _ this _ ? Lashed to the King’s side like some wretched, disposable mine canary?

 

“Nah, this be your job here to scry, and it be a very important one. Not your fault ya got stuck here with me! The council be worrying far too much about my safety, to think that those dogs could ever touch me,” Rastakhan asserted with easy confidence.

 

Simultaneously gratified by Rastakhan’s lack of accusation and disturbed by his apparent lack of concern over something that was  _ deeply  _ relevant to Zul at this point in time, he couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead he fiddled with the pen in his hands, twisting the cap.

 

“...Ah, I should be letting you get on with your prophet business.”

 

Zul gratefully took the exit.

 

\------------------------------

 

Ensconced back in his blankets, Zul jotted down the remaining details of his vision after they’d been thoroughly jarred from his brain by that debacle. Already the smaller details like the patterns on the enemy hexxer’s armor had fled his memory like sand in a sieve.

 

Ugh, this would have to do. It chafed. Excellent memory, and failing that, excellent record-keeping, was of paramount importance to all prophets.

 

He rolled up the parchment and sealed it, and put his writing supplies away. It was now the war council’s responsibility to act on this information.

 

He padded over to the door, untying the door flaps to pass the message on to a guard, thinking abstractly already about whether he’d be lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a second detailed vision with the few hours of sleep he had left tonight. Hopefully he’d be quieter this time…

 

**_DANGER_ **

 

The apprentice prophet froze as the whispers of the spirits abruptly rose into a howl, pushing a cacophony of images into his mind.

 

_ Moonlight on a tattered blue feathers _

 

_ Confusion, confinement, panic _

 

_ A lone egg, cracked, on a grassy plain _

 

_ Heat, blood. Screaming _

 

_ A surface the texture of burlap, magnified thousandfold and stretching into the darkness _

 

_ Mud on a favorite toy _

 

_ Re’tani’s blade across Zul’s throat _

 

Zul pushed through the gibbering nonsense to seize upon the vision of his own execution, purposefully tracing that thread back in time - 

 

_ Rastakhan, prone on the jungle floor, chest gouged open, white bone exposed in gleaming viscera - _

 

_ Enormous claws passing a millimetre from his own shocked face -  _

 

_ A small lizard, a harmless native breed, passing through the open tent flaps -  _

 

_ An aberration in the shadows - a stealth-cloaked troll - opening a sigil-etched jar -  _

 

_ Zul, opening the tent door. _

 

All of this, in the fraction of a second.

 

A shadow darted through the door.

 

Zul’s foot caught the lizard’s tail, but it wriggled free with unnatural force.

 

“KILL THE LIZARD!” Zul screamed.

 

“Wha-” he heard Rastakhan’s confused voice at the other end of the tent.

 

Heart in his throat, Zul turned and saw Re’tani impale the lizard to the floor with her spear with a casual movement.

 

“KILL IT! NOW! GET AWAY!” Zul ordered frantically even as he dropped his scroll and lunged towards the struggling animal. Re’tani looked at him in confusion at the contradictory commands. Tevuha shrugged and stepped forward to finish it with his dagger but not fast enough and  _ they were all too close too close too close _

 

Zul hit the ground, grabbed the tail of still-flailing lizard, his pull shearing it from the spear bloody and nearly in twain. He rolled onto his back with a convulsive twist and threw it at the open door, past the guards which had burst into the tent -

 

But he was a scholar, who ill had opportunity to practice their aim.

 

It bounced pathetically off the tent wall several feet from the door, landing in middle of the newly arrived guards with a bloody smack.

 

For one breathless moment they observed the utterly harmless lizard, and then the terrified Zul, with bafflement.

 

_ “Get away from it-” _

 

And then the hex finally faded

 

and there was an enormous devilsaur there with them in the disintegrating tent, bloody and shrieking its death throes.

 

A thrashing tail caught him in the chest and he sailed numbly into the darkness.

 

\------------------------------

 

His ribs hurt.

 

Someone was laughing close by.

 

It was loud and he didn’t like it and he tried to get his fellow acolyte to  _ shut up he was trying to sleep  _ but his arm hurt too and didn’t want to move.

 

Zul opened his eyes.

 

And blinked. The canopy stretched out before him, a pre-dawn blush of purple visible between the branches, and around him soldiers shouted and gestured.

 

This... wasn’t the temple.

 

A face entered his field of vision, blood splattered and cheerful.

 

“Ah, you’re awake!” 

 

The troll helped him sit up as context slowly trickled back into place for the second time in as many hours.

 

“Didn't know you had it in ya!” the king chortled.

 

_ Loa _ , the devilsaur - his vision of bone and gore - the king, clawed open -

 

Zul twisted around in knee-jerk panic -  _ was the king safe _ \- and immediately regretted it as his entire body made its displeasure known.

 

“Auughhhh,” he whimpered, curling back onto himself.

 

“Ahhh, she got you good! Don't think I've ever seen a troll fly quite  _ that  _ far! I think ya cleared at least three tents!”

 

Pa'ku have mercy. He hadn’t dreamed that sensation of falling.

 

After his  _ everything  _ stopped hurting as much, Zul chanced to a careful turn to behold Rastakhan. The King was squatting next to Zul, flanked by Tevuha and Reh’tani. 

 

Rastakhan still wore his sleeping leathers, now painted in blood and gore, but from his easy stance he was obviously unharmed. Tevuha had a long gouge splitting his cheek, nearly knitted closed already. Zul felt a pang of envy, wishing he could heal half as fast as the Loa-blessed. Pledging was not an option for him, who relied on the whispers of lesser spirits.

 

Around them there were trolls laid on mats on the jungle green, some still and bandaged as healers attended to them.

 

Zul looked down at himself and saw that he had been lying on a mat as well. His chest had been poulticed and bandaged.

 

“Ya be good as new in no time, my friend! Just a little bruising!”

 

It sure didn’t feel like just a little bruising. Maybe a little breaking as well.

 

“What… happened?” Zul croaked. “After…”

 

“After ya went on ya little trip to the mountains?” The king laughed uproariously at his own joke. “Well, we had a little Devilsaur problem on our hands, didn’t we? Reh’tani! Tell Zul what happened!” The bodyguard grimaced only slightly at Rastakhan’s expectant grin.

 

“The Devilsaur was gravely injured but still strong. It slew three soldiers, injured fourteen more, and endangered the king. With a little more warning and clarity, we could have slain it from the start - “

 

_ Oh no no no- _

 

“Aw, not that!” Rastakhan complained. “This little parchment-pusher did good!” He slapped Zul hard on the back, sending him into a coughing fit. “He tried to tell you! And ya see him chase that thing like it stole his loincloth? I meant the part where you shoved your spear up its nose-”

 

Oh.

 

The unexpected validation filled him with sudden warmth.

 

He… he’d done well. The  _ king himself _ had commended Zul.

 

And as the king cheerfully nudged his long-suffering bodyguard into telling more of the tale, spirits obviously lifted by seeing combat for the first time in weeks, Zul thought:

  
Maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t be  _ that  _ bad.

**Author's Note:**

> Devilsaur hand grenade, you heard it here first
> 
> I thought of the possible bodyguard applications of a personal danger-sense while wondering how exactly prophet powers work, and the idea was so interesting that this ended up happening.
> 
> Credit to [Did](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Did/pseuds/Did), [mcfuck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcfuck/pseuds/mcfuck), and [tadok0ro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tadok0ro/pseuds/tadok0ro) for betaing, special thanks to Did for pestering and throwing suggestions at me after I stalled on writing this so that I finally finished it!
> 
> Comments and kudos appreciated! I am [atalzul on tumblr](https://atalzul.tumblr.com), talk to me about Zul!


End file.
